Author: AJ

Continuing their strong efforts to promote online shopping, eBay India now supports 27 new net-banking options in addition to the three options which were provided earlier – ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, and Citibank. This is in addition to the Credit Card/Debit Card/Cash Card options. The complete list of supported banks is given below (in alphabetical order):

Axis Bank

Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait

Bank of Baroda

Bank of India

Bank of Maharashtra

Central Bank of India

Citibank

City Union Bank

Corporation Bank

Deutsche Bank

Development Credit Bank

Federal Bank

HDFC Bank

ICICI Bank

IDBI Bank

Indian Bank

Indian Overseas Bank

IndusInd Bank

Karnataka Bank Ltd

Karur Vysya Bank

Kotak Bank

Lakshmi Vilas Bank

Oriental Bank of Commerce

Punjab National Bank

Shamrao Vitthal Co-operative Bank

South Indian Bank

State Bank of India

Union Bank of India

Vijaya Bank

Yes Bank Ltd.

Addition of more net-banking options was always requested by the eBay.in community. In a country with 40+ banks (excluding co-operative banks), providing net-banking option for just 3 of them was something really serious to be taken care of. And now, it’s done.

Note: The following post was written with data available at the time of writing (12th January, 2010). The movie, ‘ 3 idiots’ is not in the Top lists anymore; it was at the time of writing.

Director Rajkumar Hirani’s Aamir Khan starrer – 3 Idiots makes it to the IMDb Top 250, ranked at #216 with a whopping rating of 8.9/10, at the time of writing. 3 Idiots is the first Indian movie to make it to the IMDb Top Chart. It’s also the first movie to be officially released and distributed on YouTube, 3 months after it’s release.

The money-spinning entertainer has been breaking box-office records right from the first day and have already swept a number of awards and nominations. And now with the IMDb feather in it’s cap, it’s gonna’ go way much forward.

This is a clear sign of the Web making its way into the life of masses. IMDb charts consider votes from regular voters only and that means there are quite a lot active IMDb users from India who just voted a movie they loved, up the glory to the IMDb charts.

Interestingly, Abhijeet Mukherjee points out that Aamir Khan starrer blockbusters have been following a pattern. They’re all end-December releases.

2007 – Taare Zameen Par – Released on 21st December (nominated for Oscars)

2008 – Ghajini – Released on 25th December

2009 – 3 Idiots – Released on 25th December

2010 – ? :D

Update: According to devakishor on twitter, this is apparently the second movie to get into the top 250 for IMDb. An earlier Aamir Khan starrer, Taare Zameen Par, also made it to the top 250 list. However we could not ascertain the ranking for the earlier movie, though there are some scanty reports available on the net that it was actually a part of the list. We will confirm this when we get proper news about it.

The redesign totally takes one back into the past, with those flashy backgrounds, pixelated images and funky GIFs spread all over the page. We urge you to take a look at the XKCD redesign and join them in their tribute to the much loved and such an important chapter in the history of Web – Geocities.

Here’s a full page screen-shot of the XKCD website redesigned to commemorate the event.

Jinni, called the Pandora of movies moved into public beta earlier last week which means anyone can now sign up and start using it.

Cnet regarded Jinni as “the best recommendation engine on the web. Period.” because, it really is. Thanks to Jinni’s huge movie catalogue, you can search for movies based on Mood, Plot, Genres, Time/Period, Place, Audience, and more.

You feel like watching a cheerful movie – you search for cheerful. You suddenly feel like watching a movie shot in Hawaii there, you have it.

You need not sign up to use the Jinni search. Then why is this open registrations’ a big deal, you ask. Recommendations. You can rate and add to your library, the movies you’ve watched. Just like last.fm recommendations, Jinni will provide you with awesome sweet recommendations once you start telling Jinni your movie taste.

Flickr is an awesome place, whether it’s for photography inspiration, beautiful photos to be included in your projects (thanks to CreativeCommons) or even just to keep yourself entertained. It could be said that the greatest use of Flickr (other than getting to know how beautiful out world is) is that you get stunning photos that can be used in your designs.

This new tool – Multicolr, allows you to search over 10 million “explored” photos on Flickr that are licensed under a CreativeCommons license, by specifying colors. [“Explored” photos on Flickr means, the photos which were featured specially by the team at Flickr based on the photos’ interestingness].

If you’re designing a greeting card, a brochure or an image to be used in your blog post, you could easily search for very interesting CC-licensed photos from Flickr that could be used in your design. Since you are searching based on colors, the images will always blend with our current design. You can specify up to 10 colors. You may select a single color multiple times, which will increase it’s prominence.

I used the tool to search for images that contain the color of the theme we use here at Techie-Buzz and got this. To that, added two yellow-orange colors and got this. Reset all selections and gone for a dark combination and got this.

Pretty impressive ? You bet!

How did they manage this? “We extracted the colours from 10 million of the most interestingCreative Commons images on Flickr. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.”

It’s a great way to use Flickr, which is great in itself. You can easily find awesome, legally available photos that blend with your designs and colors. Above all, it’s just fun to use.

The programs that get executed every time you boot up your computer (called startup entries) affects the speed of the startup process very badly. This situation could be managed by disabling unwanted programs and selectively enabling startup programs using any startup manager. Here is a tip to speed up the startup even more by delaying the needed-but-less important startup programs using a very good freeware security tool for Windows, WinPatrol.

Once installed, WinPatrol will run in the background and will alert you if any change is made to the system settings, there by, preventing malwares from getting installed. What we are going to use now, is the ‘Delayed Startup’ feature of Winpatrol.

How To

Launch WinPatrol

In the “Startup Programs” tab, right click the program you want to delay and select “move to delayed start”

Switch to the “Delayed start” tab and you’ll find the program you just delayed in the list there. By default, the delay value is 30 seconds, but you can set it to a maximum of 1 hour, by right-clicking the program in the list and selecting the ‘Delay start options’.

Usage Tips

This method could be used to delay helper/tray agents like iTunes helper, PC suite helpers of phone softwares etc.

Introducing ‘Flickroom‘ (in beta at the time of writing), an Adobe AIR app that ports entire features of Flickr into an installable AIR app along with some new value added features that makes it easy to manage and organize your flickr. Flickroom provides the rich browsing experience Flickr users have long deserved.

The app makes aggressive use of Flickr API (in a nice way). You can comment on your photos, add notes to it, save photos to disk, tweet your photos without leaving Flickroom and much more. I was skeptical about the responsiveness of the app before trying it out because, heavy AIR apps usually are so unresponsive. But Flickroom is good and is responsive, even with all the Flickr features built into it. The interface is well crafted and is very intuitive that you will never get lost in there.

Here’s how it looks like when logged into a Flickr account: (Click on image for the enlarged version)

How to Install Flickroom

Since it’s built on the AIR platform it requires Adobe AIR run-time to be installed on your computer. If you haven’t got that installed, get it here at Adobe’s site. (If you’re using twitter clients like Twhirl and tweetdeck, you have AIR installed on your computer).

Go to the Flickroom site and install it from the download badge present there.

And now when Flickroom is installed and launched for the first time, you should authorize it to connect it to your Flickr profile. (Instructions to do this will be shown to you). Once you’re finished authorizing Flickroom with Flickr, you’re done. You’re all set to experience Flickr like never before!

If you love Flickr and frequently spend your time there, Flickroom will make it all the more entertaining. (But remember, not everything must work perfect. It’s in Beta) (You may follow Flickroom on twitter.)

As it’s very clear, Twitter is a paradigm shaking platform surprising even its creators with its usage and popularity. We’ve seen it evolving from just a status updating platform to something much more bigger. During the evolution, it was photo sharing that happened first, then came songs and video. And now real file sharing comes to twitter with FileSocial.

Yes. You can now share files from your computer with your twitter followers. As easy as selecting a file and hitting the upload button.

Comments could be made to the uploaded items and will be sent as @reply to you (Twitpic model)

I’ve tried it with a sample JPG image and it worked pretty nice. But, please note that all the uploaded files are PUBLIC and could be accessed by anyone. As it is with all sharing activities on web, please be sure about what you’re doing. That said, having a “make this private” option (like the “protect tweets” option on twitter) would make this even more nicer. Maybe they’ll add it soon.

Pretty soon after the Ubuntu 9.04 release, the Canonical Group launches Ubuntu One – a service to store your data online and sync between multiple Ubuntu computers. It is seen as a step to take Ubuntu to more people and project Ubuntu as a viable & productive platform.

The service is currently in invitation-based Beta mode, which requires you to have an invite to use/test it. To request an invite, you need to have a Launchpad account and sign in at Ubuntu One and wait for a confirmation mail.

The GMail Labs programme keeps on coming up with awesome nifty features that make emailing more powerful. This time, they’ve brought Google Search right into GMail with the “Google Search in GMail” labs.

On enabling this feature from labs settings, you’ll see a google search box at the left side in GMail, this is different from the search feature already available in Gmail. Searching for something using this search box will load the top search results in a box (similar to the chat and tasks boxes, but, a little bigger). This ensures that you stay right in GMail, even when you have to search for something, thereby increasing productivity.

You can insert the search results without copy-pasting by clicking on a drop down arrow that shows up when you hover over a result.

It’s kind of intelligent that the available actions shown by the drop down arrow depends on where you are while searching. That is, if you were composing a mail, you’ll have “Insert into the email”, if you were reading a mail there’ll be “Start a reply with the result inserted”, and if you were on a chat, you’ll have “Send this result by chat to”.

If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you’re not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you’re composing (that’s âŒ˜ + g for Mac users).

Tip: If you use labels and have keyboard shortcuts enabled, typing ‘g‘ and then ‘l‘ (meaning Goto Label) will pop up a box where you can type the name of the label and go there. You can see how this works in our earlier tutorial about Browsing Labels more Quickly in Gmail.

Now that there are 45+ labs features available in GMail, we suggest you to use the “Navbar-drag and drop” feature so that you can arrange the different modules to the left and right of your inbox.